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Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2014 14:33:42 -0500
From: Gorkem Ercan <gorkem.ercan@gmail.com>
To: dev@cordova.apache.org
Subject: Engines and plugins
Message-ID: <20140113193342.GA23615@gmail.com>
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JBoss Tools have recently added the capability to switch between
Cordova engines. See [1] for details. While implementing checks for
plug-in compatibility I found the engine definitions on the plug-in specification to
be more complex than needed to be. 

I think there are too many "default engines" defined. 
for instance 
  <engine name="cordova-android" version=">=1.8.0" />
is essentially the same as 
  <engine name="cordova" version=">=1.8.0" platform="android" />

Could someone remind the reason for having platform specific default engine names? If
they exist for a historic reason can we remove it from the documentation
and guide people to use the platform attribute? I can provide a doc patch for this purpose.
I think this is making the implementation on plugman more complex also. 

And specifying custom Apache Cordova-based frameworks is a different
beast altogether. It actually gives the responsibility to integrate a
custom engine with plugman to the plug-ins with the scriptSrc attribute.
I do not think this will scale considering that the engine and plug-in
ideally have a different life cycle. I think plugman should actually
provide a way for custom engines to provide this information. 

I guess there is some merit to engines such as "apple-xcode" but I have
yet not been able to find a plug-in that uses those. I must also admit
the use of engine definitions is also very limited.

[1] http://www.gorkem-ercan.com/2014/01/multiple-cordova-engines-on-jboss.html